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15

Entanglement
My goal: To hopelessly, ineradicably, entangle the two peoples
wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Then I would wait as the Israeli population on the West Bank grew,
and grew some more. I would wait until 2017, 50 years after the Six
Day War, which ended with Israel in control of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip. I would go before the UN and say the following:
"We, the Palestinians, no longer seek a homeland of our own. We
recognize the permanence of Israeli occupation, the dominion of the
Israeli military and the power of the Israeli economy. So we would
like to join them. In the 50 years since the beginning of the
’temporary’ occupation, we have seen hundreds of thousands of
Israelis build communities near our own communities. We admire
what they have built, and the system of laws that governs their lives.
Unlike them, many of us live under Israeli military law but have no
say in choosing the Israelis who rule us. So we no longer want
statehood. We simply want the vote."
And this, of course, would bring about the end of Israel.
Apartheid State
Either the Jews of Israel would grant the Palestinians the vote, at
which point their country would lose its Jewish majority and its
identity as a refuge for the Jewish people, or it would deny them the
vote, and become an apartheid state. The latter option is untenable, of
course: Many Jewish Israelis would be repulsed by this thought;
other nations that already consider Israel a pariah would now have
just cause; and Israel would lose its last remaining friend, the U.S.,
because no American -- including and especially young American
Jews -- would identify with a country reminiscent of pre-Mandela
South Africa.
If Netanyahu had been thinking strategically, he might have realized
this when he went before Congress this morning. And he might have

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